Religious Diversity As a Media Regulation Issue: the Changing Frameworks in German and Dutch Public Broadcasting Regulation
Religious Diversity as a Media Regulation Issue: The Changing Frameworks in German and Dutch Public Broadcasting Regulation Tim KARIS It is a truism that societies, particularly in the Western world, are diver- sifying. It is probably less obvious that this is also true for the religious field. Contrary to the assumption popularized in the secularization thesis, religion has not lost all societal significance and many individuals continue to make sense of the world through religious terms (e. g. Casanova 1994; Berger 1999; Graf 2004). The persistence of religion in Western societies is not only related to migration processes, but also to a growing individual- ization of religious beliefs. With regards to migration, the last decades have witnessed a large number of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and, most notably in numerical terms, Muslims migrating to Western Europe, particularly to larger metropolitan areas. These migrants, their children and their grand- children have often created or maintained their own religious communities, considerably diversifying the hitherto largely Christian religious field in the process. However, religious diversification does not result from migration alone. Rather, it can also be understood as a consequence of religious indi- vidualization, for an increasing number of people today live religious lives outside traditional religious institutions. Many of them develop their own belief-systems by syncretizing elements and symbols from existing tradi- tions, a phenomenon that has been called "patchwork-religion" (Wuthnow 1998) or "bricolage" (Hervieu-Leger 2005). This, of course, increases reli- gious diversity to unprecedented extends. The religious diversification of society provides a challenge for many public institutions, such as schools, prisons or hospitals that have tradition- ally often been either run by the Christian churches or, for historic reasons, have been tailored to their needs.
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